Trying To Cut Calories? Skip The Dip With Your Chips

Yes, it's hard to resist a bag of chips, but here's a trick if you're trying to cut calories- skip the dip. Researchers discovered that when consumers pair chips with dip, their caloric intake shot up by 77% compared to just eating chips alone.

Snacks make up about a quarter of the average person's daily calorie intake, yet eating behavior around snacking remains surprisingly understudied.

John Hayes, professor of food science and director of the Penn State Sensory Evaluation Center, a corresponding author of the latest study emphasizes that understanding snacking behavior is essential for tackling issues of overeating and obesity.

To explore this, the research team investigated how adding a dip to a salty snack affected eating behavior and found some surprising results. When dips were served, people not only consumed more calories, but they also ate at a faster rate and took larger bites, according to the results published in Food Quality and Preference.

The study examined 46 adult participants during two visits to Penn State's Sensory Evaluation Center, where they were served 70 grams of ranch-flavored chips, with or without a third of a cup of ranch dip. Participants were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but their intake was carefully measured. Every session was video recorded and annotated for bite counts and active eating time.

Researchers then used this data to analyze "eating microstructure," focusing on factors like eating rate and bite-size to understand how the addition of dip affected snacking behavior.

"On average per eating session, participants consumed 345 calories of chips and dip compared to 195 calories of chips alone," the news release stated.

"The most striking finding of our study is that people didn't eat fewer chips when dip was available — they ate the same amount of chips, plus the dip. This lack of compensation means that adding dip to chips can substantially increase overall energy intake without people realizing it," Hayes said in a news release.

"This research opens up new avenues for exploring how the physical properties of foods can influence our eating behaviors and ultimately, our energy intake. If we can slow people down, we can influence energy consumption without giving up the pleasure from food," Hayes added.